Spotify’s New Personalization Could Be Awesome

The big news today is that Spotify is not only adding video content, but also a much more personalized music experience for its users. Mobile music is something I’ve been obsessed with ever since I bought an iPod Classic years ago to bring my entire music collection on the go. I switched to Google Play Music All Access a few years ago, primarily for the offline radio station capability and the built-in Songza features.

However, Spotify’s vision of a totally personalized music experience is something I’ve wanted for a long time – I first outlined this 7 years ago, hoping it would come from Last.FM, and am interested to see how Spotify execute on it. The truth is, there are all sorts of thing that affect the type of music that I want to listen to at any given moment – the weather, time of day, day of the week, my physical location, whatever I’m currently doing (driving, cleaning, etc). The data is all there, sprinkled around in various places – hopefully Spotify will be the first ones to finally stitch it all together in a usable way.

With these massive catalogs of music, being able to deliver up new and interesting music is a challenge that all of the current streaming services struggle with. This is especially true for those of us who don’t care for the current crop of “Top 40” music, or who listen to “old-school” music more often than not.

I’ll likely give this a shot, but I’m not 100% sold – Spotify has offline playlist support, but they haven’t been quick to support the “offline Pandora-style stations” that Google Play Music All Access offers. They also have a horrendously designed desktop client, and refuse to support Chromecast, for some ridiculous reason.